The old BUFF that's still performing:

Good news for Memorial Day weekend......"Wise Guy" returns; another one brought back to continue serving!
https://www.businessinsider.com/the-us-air-force-just-brought-a-b-52-bomber-back-from-the-boneyard-2019-5?amp_js_v=0.1
These things are still just freakin' amazing!

 

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A great airplane, a great day, a great legacy, but I will never like the Vietnam livery. Not quite a B-52 style of camouflage. Garish to me. It's difficult for me to believe that 68 years ago I worked on the first iteration of that airplane. I had no idea at age 93 that it would outlive me. We couldn't make it to that celebration today but it looked like it was well attended.

 

Bob- SAC was trying to look like TAC at the time and their nuke missions (SIOP) were at low level then. We would see them all the time on the old Oil Burner low levels in the 70s.

 

It's amazing to me that the Lancaster was last built in 1945. The b52 is only 7 years younger..

 

Good things last almost forever. The B-52 has eliminated the "almost". Great minds created it, great engineers designed it, great mechanics built it, a great company guided it. Where did everybody go!

 

I disagree. A well designed metallic airframe should have a finite life. The fact that the B-52s have been flying for so long means they are way heavier than they could have been. Now obviously metal fatigue was just starting to be understood in the 50s, and I'm not suggesting that they should have done anything differently with a B-52. However a great airplane designed today should last until the end of its design life, not forever.

 

I'm not addressing metal fatigue. I was referring to the design configuration and overall concept that was worked out in 1950 and is still viable. The airplane is still recognizable the original B-52. The Lockheed C-130 is in the same category. Who knows what the design life was when the B-52 was conceived ? It was designed to hit an adversary that was a long way off and it can still do the mission and it is still respected..

 

The original design concept was for a one-way mission to the USSR. The only viable part then was that there was some expectation that some of the airplanes would actually make it to the target. Today it can't get anywhere close to a combat zone that has air defense systems. Its only virtue now is that it is easier to adapt it for delivery of stand-off weapons than other cargo aircraft.

 

I know and agree to all that. I didn't say USSR specifically. The aircraft is still useful.

 

Since we're talking about BUFFs being brought back into service, one of the more recent returns (Ghost Rider) brought out some footage from Pratt & Whitney's vaults of the B-52 in a unique role. Back in the '70s and early '80s, Pratt had a B-52 as a flying test bed for the JT9D. 6 little motors and one big one.

 

I sit here looking back almost 70 years in disbelief. I still remember my disbelief then when I first looked at the B-52 mockup, a wood and metal iteration of the real airplane from which I had to make three dimensional drawings of the wiring and tubing installations that were to be translated into production drawings for the production line people to use in building the airplane. Prior to that I drew three dimensional drawings of the structural components so that planning people could figure out how to build the airplane. I got to know the airplane pretty well. I saw it make its first take off in April 15th, 1952 and I still clearly remember it. It flew west over the Puget Sound and then made a wide 180 and flew back over Boeing Field. As it flew over us heading east, I also remember Tex Johnston talking to flight test control that he was heading for " Moses" ( Moses Lake) and to tell his wife to have some Jack Rabbit stew ready for dinner. The eight wheel main gear was still down when he flew over heading east. I saw many test flights at Boeing Field after that because they didn't go to Muroc then. Some of the flights almost ended in disaster, too. Totally different than what is going on now.

 

Jaguar36- When was the last time you designed an aircraft with a slide rule and engineering rules of thumb? You wanted to make sure the part you designed did not break, and that leads to a little extra weight and a lot of extra robustness.

 

The fuselage skin is very likely min gage, as it is in diagonal tension over large areas.

Also many airframes were retired due to age (including fatigue). Only the H-model remains in service.

 

The B-52 fuselage structure departed from the usual frame, stringer, and sheet skin wrapped over it. The fuselage was built around four heavy extruded longerons. The frames in between had no stringers because the longerons took the bending loads . The skins between the longerons were supported by extruded frames and as Curry said, they were subjected to diagonal loads. That can be seen in the wrinkles on all of the airplanes , old or new. I used to watch the wing planks being formed on rollers in the Plant One building on the Duwamish River when I was working on the Boeing Gas turbine program. That building is now the premier attraction at the Museum Of flight. Looking back, the B-52 program was an archaic and primitive process that produced the airplane. Taz mentioned the slide rule and old rule of thumb design process. That caught up to the XB-52 when the rear spar showed a sagging problem when they put fuel in it. Somebody miscalculated the loads and it had to beefed up. First flight was made by the number two airplane.

 

I forgot to add that I remember that some of the side skins thicknesses were machine tapered. As big as that thing was, the crew spaces were claustrophobic. The wing had 6 different airfoils, no jig twist, and no anhedral as some think.

 

Slide rule? I do all my P/A*MC/I in my head! Throw in some Kt's from Peterson and I'm good to go. Of course Peterson only published his book on stress concentrations in 1953 so it would have been hard for the B-52 engineers to use it. Hence why I said they shouldn't have done anything differently.

My point of disagreement was that good things should last forever. They should instead less precisely as long as they were designed too.

The B-52 is still relevant today because of a number of factors, only one of which was how well designed it was. Another major factor was just how expensive it would be come to develop new airframes. There have only been 3 or 4 new bombers developed in the 70 years since the B-52. Every subsequent bomber design focused on an adversary that was roughly on the same technological playing field as us. (Aka the USSR). That made them alot more expensive and time consuming to produce, and resulted in them being fielded in much lower numbers. Hopefully the B-21 won't suffer the same fate and the B-52 can finally be retired.

I will never grow tired of hearing stories of the dreaded 7 engine landing though.

 

What do you get when you multiply stress times stress?

 

I believe another B52 was brought back from the boneyard this year.

How many hours can a B52 structuraly fly, and whats the time on the fleet today, that plus any corrsion issues should define its current lifespan.
Seems like theyre reinginign them. I read 8 engines again because a single big engine means new struts and it will bend the wing diffently. I wonder how did pratt get around that for testing the 747 engine on B52.

 

Easy, they put it on an inboard strut so it would not drag on the ground. Hard to do with two of them on the same wing,

 

They say the new engines will increase range by 30% and also have a positive effect on payload.

 

There are ads by the engine competitors in Aviation Week and Air Force magazine. Fitting 8 engines makes it much easier to upgrade the cockpit, too. All the gauges, throttles, etc, are already there and it does not waste the upgrade work that has already been done. All those pilots with 8 fingers on each hand will find the change easier, too.